Sunday 27 February 2005 08.36 EST
First published on Sunday 27 February 2005 08.36 EST

The genius of the Anglican Church has been the depth of its embedded tolerance. Walk into any one of its churches that stud our cities, towns and villages and you can almost smell the reflective friendliness seeping out of the walls. This is a church that since Henry VIII' s break with Rome has been squaring biblical injunction with the way the English actually live their lives, throwing the mantle of Christian solidarity around believers, half-believers and sceptics alike. As a national church, its job is to include and tolerate us all; it is everyone's friend in need.

Except now it is losing its way - and the English are on the point of losing part of the alchemy that makes us what we are. The church, confronting endlessly declining congregations in what seems less and less a Christian country, is suffering a crisis of confidence so severe that it has lost touch with its mission. You can't include and tolerate if the mass of English count themselves out of the whole exercise, forcing the church into apparent marginalisation. Better become the evangelist of high-octane faith. At least then, if you go down, you go down fighting.

Evangelicals have steadily increased their influence in church affairs; on one count, they now constitute a majority of its governing synod. But evangelicalism is a minority preoccupation and is forcing Anglicanism to detach itself from its old, inclusive role, transforming the church into something it's not.

Last week's anguished debates among the church's leading primates over its attitude towards homosexuality, leading to the invitation to the Americans and Canadian wings of the church to withdraw from its governing councils for three years to reflect on changing their liberal minds and reversing commitments they have made (they won't, can't and shouldn't), portend the schism that generations have wanted to avoid.

This is a landmark moment. Even five years ago, I would have been confident that, one way or another, the Anglican Church would keep together over the issue; that the tolerance in its genes would win out and that the church, as it has in the past, would find a way of squaring the Bible with the way we live now. Such confidence is impossible today.

Archbishop Rowan Williams looks and sounds agonised. It is less than three years since, as Archbishop of Wales, he warned that the church could not accept stable same-sex relationships for the laity without one day accepting them for the clergy and that the Bible did not overtly outlaw committed same-sex partnerships. It was the authentic voice of the tolerant Church of England trying to come to terms with today's sexual and social reality. Yet now he finds himself as the prelate overseeing the gradual division of the Anglican communion, desperately playing for time in the hope that something will come up.

Secularists find it hard to grasp the magnitude of what's at stake. The communion isn't just a word; it's the ethic of unity between God and church that for believers validates the whole point of the church's existence. Schism is the devil's work. Yet the auguries are that Williams's temporising will bring no relief. While the church is trapped in a discourse redolent of medieval witch-hunts and exorcism, the real world is moving on.

Only last December, the government legislated one its most progressive, if unsung, initiatives, a framework of law for civil partnerships including same-sex relationships. Gays who want to live together now have a legal framework in which they can sort out pension entitlements, insurance claims and all the other intricacies of living together on the same terms as heterosexuals. It's a vital reform.

But it does mean that month by month the church is going to face a steady build up of requests for its priests to bless the partnerships. Its evangelical wing wants to make no concession; the Bible damns homosexuality or, at least, the disputed translations do. For them, the church's job is uncompromisingly to bring the word of God to the fallen and through their adhesion to all its tenets to achieve salvation - and that means the repudiation of homosexuality.

For the true Anglican, however, the reflex response is very different. These are flesh-and-blood human beings attempting to find fulfilment and mutual love in a civil partnership; an inclusive church cannot refuse them Christ's benediction if they want it and nothing in the Bible excludes it doing so.

Williams, a reflex Anglican and deep Christian, has to tolerate and include evangelicals as the valid Christian tradition they represent, but he has to insist that they cannot rule the roost. They would turn the church into an intolerant, right-wing, homophobic sect, a road that will lead inexorably to disestablishment, self-reinforcing marginalisation, poverty and an end not just to the church's Christian influence on national life but the crucial example it affords other faith communities who want the same privileges.

A free society can't stop the establishment of, say, Muslim schools; but it can insist that, as with Church of England schools, their curriculum is liberal rather than narrow, anti-scientific and sexist. But the church's capacity to retain its breadth of appeal, liberalism and tolerance on which such an example hangs, depends in turn on its capacity to resist the dominance of evangelism - and it is losing the fight.

Part of its weakness is the potency of the evangelical, 'let's at least assert Christian values' in this pagan-society argument. But the bigger story is the contemporary defensiveness of liberalism in all its guises. Williams should offer more committed leadership, but then so should Lord Falconer and Charles Clarke on issues of criminal justice and new anti-terrorism laws; so should Blair and Straw over respecting international law; so should employer bodies and unions over immigration; so should Ruth Kelly over attempting more parity of esteem between academic and vocational education. Liberal leadership in almost every sphere is insecure and un-surefooted.

There is a lack of conviction in the notions of progress and advance. Because so much seems to be exposed to unsettling change, values that promote it, such as tolerance, openness, respect for diversity and insistence on equality before the law, are seen as accelerating the processes that are destabilising old certainties.

Pace Hillaire Belloc, we want to hold on to Nurse for fear of something worse. The truth is very different. The best way to react to change is to embrace it with our values intact. The best response to terrorism is to sustain our faith in the judicial process along with no detention without trial.

The best response to immigration is not to panic about the threat of the 'other'. The best Church of England is one that stays true to its tradition of inclusion and tolerance. To surrender all this because of so-called 'legitimate' concerns about security, identity or the real meaning of the Bible will be to change England into something it is not. We will not like the results. Liberals have to hold the line across the entire front, the Church of England included.